Last Year’s Exceptional Is This Year’s Standard

Oreo set the bar in 2013, building a publishing system with a cadence of creativity, doing 100 pieces in 100 days around a strong brand idea. While not all brands need to be publishing at that pace, having a well-developed publishing system that aligns business objectives, creativity and media is now cost of entry.

Both brands and agencies have realized that to excel creatively in a connected world, they must think and behave differently. Great publishing must be complemented with a strong campaign, built for an increasingly engaged and mobile consumer.

Designing For The People Who Matter

Facebook’s large-scale audience is important, but it’s just the start of the opportunity. Agencies that understand this start by finding the people they really need to connect with, then invest in the craft of production and writing, designing brilliant ideas targeted at these people and built for a feed-driven world.

We’re entering a world where we can truly make business feel more personal again. Our marketing target — the nuanced, human person with their hopes, ambitions, and needs that we as marketers care about and build things for — is now also our media target. Because Facebook has real identity, brands and agencies can apply a personal context to create things that are individually relevant to a large audience of people. This will redefine the art and science of the campaign.

There are massive advantages to this. As brands unlock their creative potential, they will be able to create stories that are additive to people’s overall experience on Facebook, which will drive meaningful business results.

A great example is the launch of the Ford EcoSport, which was promoted as a piece of technology to people who had identified themselves on Facebook as genuine technophiles. The conversion rate was enormous, with vehicles selling out across 11 countries. By focusing on relevance and unlocking its creative potential, Ford was able to match a story with an opportunity, driving business success for the brand.

Building For A Multidevice World

The rapid shift to a multidevice world is the biggest change we’ll experience in our lifetime, and it will demand a radical transformation in the way we design, distribute, and invest in our ideas. We have to move away from a world of immersive microsite islands and deep experiences to one in which we meet people where they are and with content they want.

One agency that has embraced this change is Droga5 with its work for Newcastle Brown Ale. The If We Made It campaign is an amazing example of atomized storytelling across multiple devices. It’s designed to be consumed piece by piece, which enhances the experience for consumers and drove significant success for the business.

Creativity Deserves Amplification

There’s an enormous value to great creativity in the Facebook ecosystem — whenever we look at people who are investing behind work, great creative does exponentially better. News Feed rewards craft, bravery, and creativity, but great ideas need to reach the people that matter at a scale that matters. Amplification is an integral part of the media and creative marriage that we see coming together.

That isn’t just true for Facebook; it’s true of all digital media. If you are doing something that’s astoundingly good, you want to make sure it reaches the people that matter — at a scale that’s going to empty warehouses and build factories. For any brand today, the core question should be, “Did this fundamentally achieve our business objectives?” In most cases, on most days, that’s going to require investment to make sure your work delivers.

Start With The Business Objective And Execute Boldly

When we looked at what separated the great work on the shortlist from the simply very good, alongside the criteria we laid out about leveraging the platform, using our tools, demonstrating creativity, and achieving business results, the jury was also focused on originality. There was a lot of work that was impressive, but we felt that we’d maybe seen something similar in a different guise. The gold and silver winners had a freshness and originality that the jury felt set them apart.

It didn’t matter if the idea itself was a million-dollar film or an amazing offer to drive in-store trialing — we saw success across a wide variety of activations. One Silver Award winner from Sport Chek and its agency, North Strategic, in Canada was a social flyer that replaced the Sunday circular in a newspaper. The work was brilliant. Rather than start with a big, sexy idea, Sport Chek asked itself about its business objective, about who they were trying to engage, and about how they could give those people extraordinary value. And that’s what we think is the mark of a great campaign.

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